Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Now Paul Ryan is a Hayekian

Adam Davidson in New York Times Magazine writes:
As Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney take the stage in Tampa next week, the ghost of an Austrian economist will be hovering above them with an uneasy smile on his face. Ryan has repeatedly suggested that many of his economic ideas were inspired by the work of Friedrich von Hayek, an awkwardly shy (and largely ignored) economist and philosopher who died in 1992. A few years ago, it was probably possible to fit every living Hayekian in a conference room. Regardless of what happens in November, that will no longer be the case. 
Hayek’s ideas aren’t completely new to American politics. Some mainstream Republicans, including Ronald Reagan, have name-checked him since at least the 1980s as a shorthand way of signaling their unfettered faith in the free market and objection to big government. But few actually engaged with Hayek’s many contentious (and outrĂ©) views, particularly his suspicion of all politicians, including Republicans, who claim to know something about how to make an economy function better. For these reasons, and others, Hayek has become fashionable of late among antigovernment protesters, and if Ryan brings even a watered-down version of his ideas into the Republican mainstream, the country’s biggest battles about the economy won’t be between right and left, but within the Republican Party itself — between Tea Party radicals who may feel legitimized and the establishment politicians they believe stand in their way... 
 Hayek and the rest of his ilk — known as the Austrian School — reject this. To an Austrian, the economy is incomprehensibly complex and constantly changing; and technocrats and politicians who claim to have figured out how to use government are deluded or self-interested or worse. According to Hayek, government intervention in the free market, like targeted tax cuts, can only make things worse.
It's good to see Hayek and the Austrian school get well deserved attention, but for Davidson to write:
 Many of Ryan’s most famous proposals have clear Hayekian roots. 
is absurd.

This is probably  the best thing to point to as far as Hayek's view on potential leaders such as Ryan. In a chapter called "Why The Worst Get on Top," in his book The Road to Serfdom, Hayek wrote:
There are three main reasons why such a numerous group, with fairly similar views, is not likely to be formed by the best but rather by the worst elements of any society. First, the higher the education and intelligence of individuals become, the more their tastes and views are differentiated. If we wish to find a high degree of uniformity in outlook, we have to descend to the regions of your moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive instincts prevail. This does not mean that the majority of people have low moral standards; it merely means that the largest group of people whose values are very similar are the people with low standards.

Second, since this group is not large enough to give sufficient weight to the leader's endeavors, he will have to increase their numbers by converting more to the same simple creed. He must gain the support of the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own but are ready to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently. It will be those whose vague and imperfectly formed ideas are easily swayed and whose passions and emotions are readily aroused who will thus swell the ranks of the totalitarian party.

Third, to weld together a closely coherent body of supporters, the leader must appeal to a common human weakness. It seems to be easier for people to agree on a negative program — on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off - than on any positive task. The contrast between the "we" and the "they" is consequently always employed by those who seek the allegiance of huge masses. The enemy may be internal, like the "Jew" in Germany or the "kulak" in Russia, or he may be external. In any case, this technique has the great advantage of leaving the leader greater freedom of action than would almost any positive program...

To be a useful assistant in the running of a totalitarian state, therefore, a man must be prepared to break every moral rule he has ever known if this seems necessary to achieve the end set for him. In the totalitarian machine there will be special opportunities for the ruthless and unscrupulous. Neither the Gestapo nor the administration of a concentration camp, neither the Ministry of Propaganda nor the SA or SS (or their Russian counterparts) are suitable places for the exercise of humanitarian feelings. Yet it is through such positions that the road to the highest positions in the totalitarian state leads. A distinguished American economist, Professor Frank H. Knight, correctly notes that the authorities of a collectivist state "would have to do these things whether they wanted to or not: and the probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tenderhearted person would get the job of whipping master in a slave plantation."

A further point should be made here: Collectivism means the end of truth. To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the ends selected by those in control; it is essential that the people should come to regard these ends as their own. This is brought about by propaganda and by complete control of all sources of information.

The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as this complete perversion of language.
Yes, the propagandist are out there: Ryan is a Randian, Ryan is a Hayekian. Both  Rand and Hayek were advocates of free markets, Ryan is a government technocrat, who use free market language to protect big government by dressing it up in free market clothing.

Bottom line: Ryan is not a Hayekian. It was who Hayek warned us about the Ryan-types.

7 comments:

  1. I do believe that Ryan was motivated toward government employment by one of Rand's characters, I just do not know if it was Wesley Mouch or Mr Thompson or Kip Chalmers.

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  2. "Friedrich von Hayek, an awkwardly shy (and largely ignored) economist and philosopher who died in 1992." Here I thought he won the Nobel Prize in 1974. Oh well, I ignore Krugman... so be it.

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  3. Ryan in 2002:

    Well how about that. It seems Paul Ryan decided to vigorously support stimulus spending after all. Just look at what Congressman Ryan is saying about the value of government support in the aftermath of a recession:

    “What we’re trying to accomplish today with the passage of this third stimulus package is to create jobs and help the unemployed,” Ryan said.

    “What we’re trying to accomplish here is the recognition of the fact that in recessions, unemployment lags on well after a recovery has taken place,” Ryan said. “We have a lot of laid-off workers, and more layoffs are occurring. And we know, as a historical fact, that even if our economy begins to slowly recover, unemployment is going to linger on and on well after that recovery takes place.”
    “You have to spend a little to grow a little,” Ryan told constituents at a town hall in Wisconsin. “What we’re trying to do is stimulate that part of the economy that’s on its back.”

    “We’ve got to get the engine of economic growth growing again, because we now know because of recession, we don’t have the revenues that we wanted to, we don’t have the revenues we need, to fix Medicare, to fix Social Security. To fix these issues we’ve got to get Americans back to work,” Ryan said. “Then the surpluses come back, then the jobs come back. That is the constructive answer we’re trying to accomplish here on, yes, a bipartisan basis.”


    http://blogs.detroitnews.com/politics/2012/08/19/paul-ryan-loves-stimulus-spending/

    Hayek in 1977:

    Hayek: You see, another political element was that, of course, politicians just lapped the argument and Keynes taught them if you outspend your income and run a deficit, you are doing good to the people in general. The politicians didn’t want to hear anything more than that -- to be told that irresponsible spending was a beneficial thing and that’s how the thing became so influential.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N364sN5E0hQ

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  4. Keynesian: Bob Roddis, please stop reciting the facts. They make me extremely uncomfortable. Don't you have a cult meeting to get to or something?

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  5. According to Walter Block, Hayek was a socialist.

    http://mises.org/journals/jls/12_2/12_2_6.pdf

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  6. Get ready to hear the Establishment saying that Paul Ryan's views are based on Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard.

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